


The Shadow Over Faustus

by InquisitorTauFucker (SomeWeirdWritingPerson)



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Commissar, F/F, Other, SOLDIER - Freeform, WH40K, Warhammer 40k - Freeform, warhammer 40 000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 20:27:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20297458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeWeirdWritingPerson/pseuds/InquisitorTauFucker





	The Shadow Over Faustus

**Thought of the Day: Accept your Lot!**

Rachelle was sitting on the small wooden bench outside the round adobe hut she called home, working away with a butter churn about half as tall as her. The warm summer wind blew through the holes in her dress, the bugs were chirping and chipping away in the heat, and the butter was being _extremely _uncooperative. It just didn't want to churn, no matter how much she dashed the cream and no matter how much she worked it, it just didn't harden up.

The least of her worries, though, was the butter. As an automobile drove up to her little homestead, she noticed her curious younger brother, only 7 standard years old, wandering up to the road. The automobile stopped in front of the homestead, and a man got out. Smartly dressed in the distinct grey-and-blue colours of Nepenthe, he opened a door for the actual person who had come, a man dressed and grey and black and red, colours of the nobility in specific. He didn't get out, instead just leaning his head out from the open door. 

“Hello, young lady,” he said, his expression almost pained by the fact he had to talk to one of the lower classes. “How are you doing today? Is Rachelle Poe here?”

“I'm her.”

“Wonderful. You've been summoned by Lord Vervik to serve the Emperor of Mankind in the Third Division of Nepenthe. I believe there is a small town about two kilometers from here? A truck will be coming for you, and take you there, and there will be an officer waiting for you. Do not forget to bring identification of some form.”

He nodded, as if Rachelle had said something, and was driven off.

Rachelle collapsed.

When she came too, it was because her brother was shaking her. She got up, her head pounding and her hands shaking, and told herself that everything had been a bad dream. It had to be. But the automobile tracks in the dirt and the questions of her brother dispelled any hope she had. After a few moments, she rubbed her face.

She didn't even have the time to say goodbye when a truck rolled down the road. The pain in her chest grew as she walked up to the truck. She stepped up inside, and joined about two-dozen other people, men and women, all crammed like sardinoforms in a tin can. Many of them were crying, and she felt like doing the same. It was hard to imagine anything, anything worse than this. The pressure, the pain, all built up in her chest, as if she was about to pop, and yet she didn't let herself cry.

If this was the path the Emperor had laid down for her, it was the path she would take.

Arriving at the town of Redhook, more a hamlet really, the truck unloaded along with four others, disgorging its passengers out into the street before a set of tables, each of which with a PDF soldier sitting down in front of it. Papers, identification, everything was a blur, and when her turn came to produce papers, it was only because the soldier knew her (after all, he was her uncle) that she got through.

“Please, Uncle,” she whispered, signing off on her own conscription papers. “I don't want to go.”

“I don't want you to go. But the Emperor wills it.”

“I know.”

It was, after they had gotten their papers, back to the trucks. Down bumpy country roads, to an airstrip, and from there it was being loaded on to rickety planes. She felt sick as the planes ascended into the sky, not least because it was the first time she had ever been on a plane. The skies gave her a view she never had, of towns that she thought of large being reduced to dots on a map, of fields being Regicide board squares, when she knew damn well it would take two hours to walk from one end to the other.

The plane was hot, it was humid, it felt like she was trapped in a pot over a fire. Too tight. Too hot. She begged the Emperor for strength to get through this ordeal. To be like Saint Bethany, who opposed the lords of darkness with grit and determination, even as the world collapsed around her. To be as the Adepta Sororitas, bulwarks against evil. To be as the Space Marines, his angels who stood steadfast, against all threats.

The plane ride was over after what felt like, what must have been, an eternity. It was already the evening when the plane touched down. It didn't hurt so much anymore, it was more a numbness. A complete numbness, as if someone had scooped out her viscera and left her empty. She was more an animated puppet than a person, moving to the orders of officers, from space to space, place to place, until she was sitting in a chair, her hair being shorn like a Ovis's wool. Every lock of jet-black hair, cut off and reduced to mere stubble.

And then she was issued equipment.

Segmented armor, blue and grey, just like every other piece of military hardware she saw. Blue and grey uniforms, blue and grey armor, blue and grey trucks carrying blue and grey people with blue and grey expressions.

The armor didn't fit. It was easy to adjust until it sort-of fit, but it still was too loose around the neck, too tight around the chest, too poky in the armpits. The helmet was better, when it still flopped around on her head, it was a simple poke with a knife to give her extra holes. The lasgun...oh, that was the worst of it all. Black, a little beat-up. Rachelle was not its first owner, clearly. But where it really failed was the stock. A folding wire-stock, she found it almost impossible to work with. Too short for her, she felt like she was scrunched up behind it, unable to really align herself with the sights.

Asking if there was a somewhat longer one got her embittered laughs from armoury-serfs. And so, with her equipment, she left to her own devices. Her copy of the Imperial Guardsman's Primer had her information on it, stuff she herself did not know until she opened it. Fourth battalion, under Lieutenant-Colonel Andreanna. Tenth squad, no Sergeant listed.

Wherever fourth battalion was, she would go. And that turned out to be, when she finally found her way around the vast camp, about a fifteen minute's walk from the armoury. After row upon row upon row of green tents, set up to be as uniform as possible, she finally saw the back-and-gold flag marked '4.' She assumed that meant 'forth battalion,' and her assumption was confirmed when she was barked at by someone whose name-tag read Andreanna.

“You! Get your ass over here,” she said, most likely already drunk on the power she got from familial connections. “I want you to go to the training section,” she pointed at a fairly empty field of dirt. “And get to digging out a foundation for the Falltower. Damned red-robes want to shove the work on to us before they bring their construction gear here.”

Falltower? Now was not the time for her to ask questions, instead saluting, and reaching for her e-tool. When she got to the field, the foundations had already been marked out with white plastic tape, with laminated paper marking what each place was. She found 'Falltower,' and started to dig out the marked sections. At least the work got her mind off of the deep, gnawing, uncertainty she had.

The next few days were a haze for Rachelle. Meeting soldiers in her squad, digging ditches, learning how to clean a lasgun. Learning what happened when you didn't clean a lasgun, as the now fingerless Private Horvat demonstrated during a firing exercise. The first week passed.

The emptiness didn't fill. At least, not permanently. During the day, she was too busy with training to care. At night, she imagined her family, screaming at her uncle, or mourning her loss, or simply carrying on with life as if nothing had happened, in a quest to heal the wound by ignoring it.

She couldn't ignore the wound, though, not for long. And so, even one week after she had been conscripted, the last thing she did before going to bed at night was quietly sob into a pillow.

She wasn't the only one.


End file.
